Regex

Edit: to everyone who responded, I use regex infrequently enough that the knowledge never really crystalizes. By the time I need it for this one thing again, I haven't touched it in like a year.

PSA: Run ShellCheck on your shell scripts. It turns up a shocking number of programming errors. https://www.shellcheck.net/

Clearly you don't write enough bash scripts.

I don't normally say this, but the AI tools I've used to help me write bash were pretty much spot on.

Ever since I switched to Fish Shell, I've had no issues remembering anything. Ported my entire catalogue of custom scripts over to fish and everything became much cleaner. More legible, and less code to accomplish the same things. Easier argument parsing, control structures, everything. Much less error prone IMO.

Highly recommend it. It's obviously not POSIX or anything, but I find that the cost of installing fish on every machine I own is lower than maintaining POSIX-compliant scripts.

Enjoy your scripting!

There's always the old piece of wisdom from the Unix jungle: "If you write a complex shellscript, sooner or later you'll wish you wrote it in a real programming language."

I wrote a huge PowerShell script over the past few years. I was like "Ooh, guess this is a resume item if anyone asks me if I know PowerShell." ...around the beginning of the year I rewrote the bloody thing in Python and I have zero regrets. It's no longer a Big Mush of Stuff That Does a Thing. It's got object orientation now. Design patterns. Things in independent units. Shit like that.

every control structure should end in the backwards spelling of how they started

I still have to look up the exact syntax of ifs and whiles.

I've coded in bash for a while

Today I tried to write bash (I think)

I grabbed a bunch of commands, slapped a bunch of "&&" to string them together and saved them to a .sh file.

It didn't work as expected and I did not, at all, look at any documentation during the process. (This is obviously on me, I'll try harder next time)

That's why I use nushell. Very convenient for writing scripts that you can understand. Obviously, it cannot beat Python in terms of prototyping, but at least I don't have to relearn it everytime.

Wait im not the only one? I think i relearned bash more times than i can remember.

Bash was the first language I learned, got pretty decent at it. Now what happens is I think of a tiny script I need to write, I start writing it in Bash, I have to do string manipulation, I say fuck this shit and rewrite in Python lol

Maybe applies more to regex, the write only language.

Knowing that there is still a bash script i wrote around 5 years ago still running the entirety of my high scool lab makes me sorry for the poor bastard that will need to fix those hieroglyphs as soon as some package breaks the script. I hate that i used bash, but it was the easiest option at the time on that desolate server.

And I thought I was the only one… for smaller bash scripts chatGPT/Deepseek does a good enough job at it. Though I still haven’t tried VScode’s copilot on bash scripts. I have only tried it wirh C code and it kiiiinda did an ass job at helping…

Unironically love powershell

This. But Pandas and Numpy.

Pandas and Numpy and Bash.

So true. Every time I have to look up how to write a bash for loop. Where does the semicolon go? Where is the newline? Is it terminated with done? Or with end? The worst part with bash is that when you do it wrong, most of the time there is no error but something completely wrong happens.

No, Makefile syntax is more extreme.

Any no-SQL syntax for interacting with databases.

Me with powershell. I'll write a pretty complex script, not write powershell for 3 months, come back and have to completely relearn it.

i used powershell, and even after trying every other shell and as a die hard Linux user I've considered going back to powershell cause damn man

to be honest I agree and thought we would be using something more intuitive by now

Bash substitution is regex-level wizardry.